


Forces of Destruction

by GretchenSinister



Category: Guardians of Childhood & Related Fandoms, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 22:29:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20496368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "Ok, so, one of my favorite AU concepts is a seemingly innocent/ well known by all character turns out to be something rather ancient and potentially very dangerous. (read http://archiveofourown.org/works/298326/chapters/477661 if you’re a part of the Sherlock fandom, and http://spam-monster.livejournal.com/2938.html?thread=6341242 if you’re a part of the watchmen fandom.)Now, seeing fics like http://archiveofourown.org/works/615129 that refer to just who long bunny has been around (and others that suggested even longer than that), and taking into consideration all his skills (time-traveling, shape-shifting, and so on) bunny really looks to me like the perfect choice for such an AU.While preferably Gen, I wouldn’t mind other ships too: Perhaps even giving ships like Bunny/Tooth or sub!Pitch/dom!bunny a chance?...[cut for length]"The Guardians have to fight a being from far beyond Earth. Only Bunny is able to defeat it, and Jack realizes he has to ask why. When he does, he finds out more about Bunny, Sandy, Pitch, and the Man in the Moon than he ever thought he would. I draw from bookverse, but in my own peculiar way.





	Forces of Destruction

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 1/6/2017.

When he tried to remember what they had been fighting, Jack could never picture it clearly. But he remembered how they fought—the Guardians, and Pitch, too.   
  
Pitch had been the one to warn them it was coming, insisting that they quickly negotiate a truce, referencing incidents that only Sandy and Bunny seemed to recognize. They had drawn up a treaty right then and there, and a good thing, too, for the threat—whatever it was—had arrived within hours.   
  
There had been no question of starting the battle at once. There could be no delay, this thing must leave their world before it met anyone else.   
  
The battle was very much unlike fighting Pitch. None of the Guardians, or even Pitch, had encouraged it, but Jack still felt some shame at how quickly he was removed from the fight. The light from his staff, all the ice and snow and wind he could summon—all these were as nothing.   
  
He knew whatever they fought knocked him out of the sky. He knew he had watched the rest of the battle from a cocoon of living vines. He didn’t remember what had happened in between.   
  
He hoped he wouldn’t need to remember. They had all lived, hadn’t they?  
  
Yes, they had lived, despite that battle.  
  
Jack remembered North, wielding not only his swords but a repertoire of spells that shook the earth and air, and how these were less than mosquito bites to what they fought.  
  
He remembered Tooth, guiding every single one of her fairies—there must have been millions of them—into action as a single being, and not being able to move the bulk of what they faced by so much as an inch.  
  
He remembered Sandy and Pitch, working in an accord that surprised him. He remembered them crafting and sending forth vast, strange forms of light and shadow against their adversary, and, though he didn’t know how he had known, Jack knew that the constructs he had seen were tiny fragments of what Pitch and Sandy were truly creating. He remembered that Bunny had glanced at him with concern when some of these forms coalesced into being, and he remembered a pounding headache settling in behind his eyes. And he remembered the constructs breaking themselves—all of themselves, even their unseen parts—against their enemy. (Why couldn’t he remember what it looked like? He must have looked at it hundreds of times during the battle.)  
  
He remembered the fear he felt, seeing the constructs break. In his bones and in the pit of his stomach he knew that no force on earth, and few beyond it, would have been able to withstand an assault from both Pitch and Sandy together. “It’s not the right kind for us!” Pitch had yelled to Bunny. “Stop messing around with boomerangs! There’s nothing in it! Just make it stop, make it—”  
  
Some attack from the enemy had connected with Pitch, then, and Sandy had abandoned his attack on the creature to catch him and lift him away from danger. He flashed a few symbols brightly at Bunny before moving out of Jack’s field of vision.  
  
And then…and then. Bunny had stepped into the enemy’s path. And when he did, he didn’t look like the Bunny Jack knew. Where he walked, flowering plants sprang up, and in his wake they continued to grow, upward and outward, until a line of forest stretched out behind him. He looked up at the thing before him and tilted his head to the side. He held out one palm toward it, not as a gesture to tell it to stop, but more as if Bunny was feeling for something in the air. Jack saw him nod, and then kneel so he could press both of his hands against the ground.   
  
What Jack saw after that wasn’t everything that had happened, he knew that much. What he didn’t know was if he wanted to ask what had really happened. In the cold, rocky plain of the battlefield, brilliant green grass spread from Bunny’s hands in a swift wave. The enemy ignored this, but only for a moment. It paused—the first time during the battle that it had done so much as that—and, though Jack cannot remember seeing any of this, he remembered thinking that it had paused in confusion because the grass that had spread from Bunny’s hands refused to be blighted by its touch.   
  
“That’s right!” Bunny had yelled, waving his arms in huge arcs. “I know where you’re from! And if you won’t take the hint from my friends that you should go back on your own, then you’re not going to be going back at all!”  
  
It seemed, then, that the grass under the thing had sprouted into a tall forest, though that wasn’t all that had happened, just like Pitch and Sandy’s constructs had been more than what they appeared to be. It had to be more than what it looked like, because the trees pierced the being cleanly, easily. A long blank followed in Jack’s memory, then. Possibly the thing had screamed. The next thing he could remember was opening his eyes, and seeing no blank space. Instead, what he saw was a huge island of trees and plants towering over the barren plain. And then, Bunny’s face next to his protective cocoon. “Hey, Frostbite,” he’d said. “You’re not going to want a lot of what happened here today. And you should rest.”   
  
That had seemed so nonsensical—rest? He hadn’t done anything! But, again, his memory was fuzzy, here, and it was only when he woke up in a cool room in Dreamland that he had really started to feel like himself again.   
  
And now, months later, he realized he couldn’t really let it go. “I have to ask,” he said aloud, and the wind picked him up to go find Bunny.  
  
He found him on the battlefield, picking flowers. Picking flowers, and making them disappear. The flowers, and the grasses, and the trees, and all the other plants—well, Jack had flown everywhere on Earth, and none of these plants looked quite like anything that had ever grown on this planet.  
  
“Hey,” he said, shyly. “I have questions.”  
  
Bunny nodded and dug up a bright orange flower. He cupped it in his hands and acted like he was folding it, until somehow it wasn’t there anymore. “I can’t give you your memories back. They’d be bad for you. That thing we fought wasn’t the kind of thing you can look at with human eyes and a human brain, and you’re still too close to that.”  
  
“So you took my memories?”  
  
“I made it so that Tooth could. Anyway. Now that you know that ground rule, what do you want to know?”  
  
“What was that thing we fought? I know you knew. Pitch knew, and so did Sandy—didn’t they? Well…what was it? And why did you know but Tooth, North, and I didn’t?”  
  
“Good question,” Bunny said. He folded away a green, spiky plant. “That thing was, for lack of a name, or any I’d care to use, a force of destruction. Pretty simple thing, really, but hard to stop by most means. But I’ve done it before, and once we realized what it was—this one was mimicking something similarly nasty—it was only a matter of focus.”  
  
“If you’re trying to lead me into asking what you did to get rid of it, well, I do want to know that, now. But I still want to know why you knew about it.”  
  
Bunny met Jack’s eyes and made a slight nod. “All right.” He beckoned him over to a boulder near the edge of the grove. “It’ll probably be better if we’re sitting for this.”  
  
“Well…that’s…that’s a good start?” Jack swung his legs nervously.  
  
“Most of my soul isn’t human,” Bunny said. “There was a human who was ‘me’ at one time, but the Man in the Moon wanted my/his soul as a vehicle for my ‘other’ soul. I needed an Earth soul to survive on Earth. My soul that isn’t human is that of a Pooka—a technologically advanced, spacefaring race that participated in the largest interplanetary empire the galaxy has ever seen. I’m the last of them. Or most of me is.” Bunny smiled a little. “I remember being a lot more uptight than I am now. I’m sure everyone’s glad that my human soul changed that part.”  
  
“What? What? You’re an alien? You’re the last of your species? What happened? There’s a space empire? You have two souls? What? What?” Jack had never been told any news that would have buckled his knees before, but now, he was very glad to be sitting.  
  
“I…yeah, I’m an alien,” Bunny said, and looked down. “And there’s no galactic empire anymore, for the same reason that I’m the last of my species.” He looked back at Jack. “Pitch Black.”  
  
Jack couldn’t come up with even one coherent question this time.  
  
“Of course, the Pitch Black that overwhelmed the stars is mostly gone, now,” Bunny said. “As is Sanderson Mansnoozie, wish-granter and star pilot. Most of Pitch and Sandy’s conscious souls are human. But the Man in the Moon couldn’t give them the powers you saw them wield. Those things, they can only do because of those other soul remnants living within them.”  
  
  
“Wait, wait, wait. The Man in the Moon created _Pitch_?”  
  
Bunny stretched his legs. “As he is now, yeah. Sometimes I wish I’d met the person who became the Pitch we know—you know, before his soul got tied to that of a planet-killer. But how do you ask? Pitch and Sandy have very, very few memories of the empire. The personality influence is heavy, and eerie. They know how to spot things like the force of destruction we fought. They know how to use their powers. Personally, I think both of them would like to exorcise that hazy past from themselves, for a lot of reasons, but they’d be powerless without it. Or so the Man in the Moon says. I still haven’t figured out why he didn’t want Sanderson Mansnoozie’s soul being the main one in Sandy.”  
  
“I’m…going to have to think about that for a really long time.” Jack leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Maybe you should switch to telling me what you did to the force of destruction, instead. Does it have anything to do with what you were doing to those flowers?”  
  
“Got it in one,” Bunny said. “So, a force of destruction ultimately wants to destroy a universe, but it wants to do that slowly, because as soon as it destroys a universe, it ceases to exist. All of these flowers, trees, plants—well, they’re mini-universes that I created. Doing all right?”  
  
“Um,” Jack said.  
  
“The blades of grass contain only about a zeptosecond each. Even the trees are only picoseconds. I made a lot because I knew the force of destruction would try to avoid them if it could. Destroy one of those, and everything is over for it. A force of destruction can only destroy one universe completely. And now I have to fold every single one of my mini-universes back into this one. I wouldn’t want any of them growing. Any amount of time and space can.” He paused. “I think the plant forms of these universes are the way plants looked on the Pooka’s planet.”  
  
“I’m…I’m in over my head now,” Jack admitted. “I’m glad that thing is gone forever, though.”  
  
“That one’s gone,” Bunny said. “There are more. Lots more. The Pooka were technologically advanced, like I said. We had time travel. We thought we knew how to use it. Paradoxes resolved themselves, as far as we could tell. When Pitch emerged, we tried so many times to change the past and prevent his rise. It never worked, and every paradox and no-start-point history we created—well, they didn’t resolve themselves. They created forces of destruction, like we just fought. If anyone had known…Pitch wouldn’t have been the only one jumping into our space with a planet-killer ship.”  
  
Bunny sighed. “And with all the time that passes, the forces of destruction get bigger and smarter and more sentient. Luckily our universe contains billions of years and proportional space, and so far, the forces of destruction haven’t grown fast enough to be an immediate threat to it. The real problem is that they’re attracted to sentience. Anyway, I just hope I can figure out how to teach others how to do what I did before it's too late.”  
  
“Aren’t we immortal?” Jack asked, looking more nervous than ever.  
  
“The Man in the Moon uses technology from the empire to prolong life indefinitely,” Bunny said. “If it fails, or if he decides he doesn’t want us to be immortal anymore, then we’d start having real problems.”  
  
“But he wouldn’t do that…right?”  
  
“I don’t think it’s likely currently,” Bunny said. “But the thing is…I think that the Man in the Moon made Pitch into a being like the Guardians because…he doesn’t want to lose any souls that lived during that interplanetary empire, not even the one that destroyed it. He wants it to be remembered. I think he ultimately wants to recreate it, and he can’t do that without beings like us.”  
  
“And what else do you think about that?” Jack asked. He sounded as if he already guessed at the answer.  
  
“It was an empire, Jack. A lot of innocent people died when it fell. A lot _more_ innocent people died as it rose and sustained itself. If I’m committed to stopping forces of destruction, I have to be committed to never allowing an empire like that to rise again.” He turned to Jack. “I don’t really want you to worry too much about this, all right? And remember, the Man in the Moon doesn’t know all this. He was only a baby when the empire fell. He only has children’s history books to work from. You probably know how nice they can make empires look.”  
  
“Um…yeah. Sure.” Jack was silent for several long moments. “So. I know I probably can’t help with cleaning up all this.” He gestured to the remaining plants. Universes. Universe-plants. “And maybe I can’t help with much, I mean, seriously. But…I’m on your side, Bunny. You can count on me, for whatever I can do.”  
  
“You’re a good Guardian, Jack,” Bunny said. “And thanks.” He smiled. “Never stop being you, all right?”  
  
“I promise,” said Jack, a little surprised by the emotion in Bunny’s voice. “All the way from the bottom of my lake.” 


End file.
